It’s been about 3 weeks since we were there, but I just got around to writing about it: Ascona. What a magical place! We had three days off after the training in Zurich and before heading out to Oslo, so we decided to explore Ticino, the only Italian canton of Switzerland. Chris wasn’t that excited about traveling since he was pretty tired from the week (that’s what happens when you travel so much for work-when you have time off, you just want to stay put), but we didn’t want to just stay in Zurich and kill time either. After asking around a little bit, we settled on Ascona.
We took a three our train ride to Locarno, then took a bus to Ascona. I’m not even going to tell you how amazing the train ride itself was; you can see for yourself below; I’m posting some of the photos. I always think about doing all this work or reading on the train, but I end up just staring out the window and not really getting anything done.
Ascona is located on the side of Lago Maggiore, which is partly in Italy and partly in Switzerland. When you look from the piazza into the lake, you feel like the beautiful green mountains around the lake are spilling into the water. Take a look at this:
We spent a couple of days just walking around, practicing yoga, running and eating lots of great food. On Wednesday we went on a hike through Monte Verita to Ranco, and especially the first half of the hike was one of the nicest hikes I’ve been to. Beautiful trees, stillness, clean air, the lake view, a cafe along the way where you can have some prosecco to cool off before embarking on the rest of your journey…
Overall, the food was great, our hotel had an uninterrupted lake view from our balcony, the market on Tuesday was very charming, and despite the long travel day it was a restful trip. We left on Thursday and headed out to Oslo to do some weekend workshops.